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We’re in the fourth week of the second Trump administration, and as many commentators have noted there is simply so much going on in U.S. politics—and therefore global politics: What happens on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in large measure shapes the world.

Is fascism today essentially internationalist—or is it made up of a series of discrete, nationally bounded projects?

Looking around the world today, it’s hard to escape the sense that fascism has become an internationalist project and one that transcends familiar geopolitical blocs and transnational coalitions: The new Fascist International cuts across NATO and BRICS, the West and the Global South, drawing in actors from all major geopolitical camps to form a multinational coalition of far-right, hardline nationalist, fascist-adjacent and outright fascist political actors.

There’s an old adage attributed to Napoleon: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

Trump’s first week back in the White House saw him assert his newly reclaimed authority: The 47th president fired off dozens of executive orders, appeared before a variously starstruck, cowering Davos audience, confidently mapped out his administration’s focus on Fox News’s Hannity, and, after threatening a full-blown trade war, reportedly forced Colombia, the U.S.’s premier ally in South America, to accept planeloads of deported migrants.

“BLANCHE: What you are talking about is brutal desire—just—Desire!—the name of that rattle-trap street-car that bangs through the Quarter, up one old narrow street and down another…”

— Arthur Miller, A Streetcar Named Desire

One of the strangest episodes in the still-unfolding Trump saga is the 42nd/44th president’s growing interest in Greenland, a territory controlled by Denmark, which Trump has said he wants to incorporate into the United States.

Trump has had his sights on Greenland since at least 2019. He first floated the idea of “buying” the autonomous Danish territory five years ago, which the president, in typical property-developer fashion, described as “essentially a real estate deal”:

Leigh Phillips and Michael Rozworski (2019). The People’s Republic of Walmart: How the World’s Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism. Verso Books.

What makes this cleverly titled book worth returning to five years after its publication? The authors, Leigh Phillips and Michael Rozworski, develop a deceptively simple argument: Pay closer attention to what major corporations like Walmart do, and less to what free-market ideologues say, and you’ll find that most capitalist enterprises operate more like carefully planned command economies than idealized market actors. Centralized planning, far from being relegated to the scrapheap of twentieth-century history, is alive and well at the heart of American capitalism: It lies at the core of what companies like Amazon and Walmart do every day.

Reagan (2024). Directed by: Sean McNamara. Starring: Dennis Quaid, Penelope Ann Miller, Jon Voight. (IMDb)

I must confess that Ronald Reagan’s appeal has always mystified me somewhat. Reagan (2024) the movie goes some way toward filling in the blanks, and anyone interested in thinking critically about U.S. politics would benefit from watching it. Despite being widely panned by critics—it currently holds a putrescent eighteen-percent score on Rotten Tomatoes—the film helps account for the long-standing appeal of conservatism in American society. Perhaps in spite of itself, it also demonstrates just how far conservatism has fallen, to such a degree that Trump’s MAGA movement now bears little resemblance to its ideological forbears.

Zoë Schiffer (2024). Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk’s Twitter. Portfolio. 330 pp.

We all live in Elon Musk’s world now—and as Zoë Schiffer shows in this meticulously researched book on Musk’s 2022 Twitter takeover, it is a bizarre, dysfunctional, and despotic world.

After reading Extremely Hardcore (Musk’s phrase describing the work culture he expected at Twitter), it is extremely difficult to maintain the illusion that Musk is some kind of business genius: Musk spent $44 billion to acquire a company worth only around $25 billion, effectively overpaying $19 billion, or the gross domestic product of a small country. Moreover, Musk has failed to turn Twitter/X into a profitable venture despite a ruthless slash-and-downsize program of corporate austerity. How, then, to make sense of the contrast between the outward myth of genius and the interior corporate dysfunction? Schiffer’s eminently readable blow-by-blow account of Musk’s Twitter acquisition raises the question: Is the world’s richest man still a rational decision-maker?

Today is Election Day in the United States, a defining moment not just for the U.S. but for the world as a whole.

The Apprentice (2024). Director: Ali Abbasi. Writer: Gabriel Sherman. Starring: Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Maria Bakalova. (IMdb)

Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice (2024)—the title playfully plagiarizes the 15-season reality show that made Donald Trump a household name—could hardly be more timely, purporting to tell the story of Trump’s rise from relative obscurity in 1970s Queens, New York to Manhattan moguldom by the mid-1980s.

The Apprentice does so effectively, even if it veers dangerously into aestheticism, devolving at times into an almost celebratory visual spectacle more than a critical biographical film. With all the familiar tropes of the 1980s aesthetic paraded before the audience—the big hair, VHS scan lines, disco needle-drops, cocaine-fueled parties, and the ruthlessly individualistic pursuit of profit and pleasure—The Apprentice largely forgoes deeper analysis of one of the most powerful and dangerous people in recent history, shifting blame instead onto the shadowy master-figure of Roy Cohn.

Civil War(2024). Director/Writer: Alex Garland. Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny. A24 Films. (Rotten Tomatoes) (Imdb)